Questing for some retro-fun with Quest, the Text Adventure player and creator

Description

Today's project is one that will bring back fond memories for many and maybe provide a spark for some new ideas. Some of my fondest early memories of computer use was playing Zork (on a TRS80 Model III). I spent hours playing, working through the puzzles, printing the Z source to try to find answers and dreaming about the kinds of games I could write...

Today, text adventures, aka interactive fiction, doesn't have the sizzle and hype that the cutting edge games have. Yet there's something about them that draws you in.

Then you start thinking about using them for non-gaming purposes. Think about using them for education, training, maybe even retro-marketing! And you have to imaging that it couldn't be too hard to create your own game/adventure/experience...

Quest 5 is a brand new system for creating modern text adventure games. It is a complete rewrite of Quest, and lets you create sophisticated games complete with graphics, sounds and videos, all without having to know how to program yourself - a full visual editor is included.

Visual script editor. A plain English approach to programming, where you can choose commands from searchable lists, so you don't need to remember any syntax

Highly customizable - most functionality comes from a Core library, which is written in the Quest game language (ASLX) itself

Games support unlimited undo

Games are fully translatable - there is no hard coded text within a game. You can translate the English template to create games in other languages - we already have support for Spanish, German and Dutch.

Not only do you get a cool playing environment, a visual editing tool and means to play them online or off, you get the source code to it all too! Yep, the source to it all is available (and active, with check-ins just yesterday, Friday, December 9th)

The project is a study in cross .Net development. WinForms, mixed with WPF and ASP.Net Web projects, with VB.Net, C# and Javascript, there seems to be a little of everything...

If you've never played a text adventure/interactive fiction game, or they bring back memories of days long past, if the idea of building one excites you or you're just looking for something different, Quest, and its companion site http://www.textadventures.co.uk/, is waiting for you...